Faculty Development Program

WVU Department of Emergency Medicine embraces the concept that the support and orientation provided to new faculty hires and junior academicians is crucial in supporting their future academic success. Although many new hires are enthusiastic and ready to teach, they aren’t sure how to answer the question, “teach what?” and may also be unsure of how to be successful in all realms of the academic mission—including didactic and bedside teaching, scholarship, and ultimately personal advancement up the promotion and tenure ladder.

At times, seasoned academic departments and their leadership presume that new academic faculty members have been taught the skills necessary to be a successful academician during their training. We assume that faculty come in knowing how to teach in the classroom and at the bedside effectively, how to do scholarly work that gets published, and how to get promoted successfully—but that assumption is at times incorrect, given that these topics are not typically covered in undergraduate and graduate medical education. Success as an academician is truly a learned skill.

Our faculty development program was initiated in 2019 and is co-directed by Erica Shaver and Chris Kiefer, who lead our Division of Education and Training. The WVU EM faculty development program is a longitudinal, year-long program that focuses on junior faculty development. The course consists of about 12 hours of curriculum, inclusive of traditional lecture style formats, as well as small group discussions/interactions. To make the material easy to digest, we limit each session to approx. 2 hours at a time, 6 times a year.

Topics covered include:

• What Does it Mean to be an Academic Physician?
• Effective Bedside Teaching and Giving Effective Feedback
• Picking the Best Residents
• Winning at the P&T Game
• Turning What You Do Into Scholarship
• Academic Writing Workshops

This program recognizes that there is both an instructional and coaching component to faculty development. To that end, the educational leadership team provides evaluations and feedback during the first 6 and 12 months of employment for new hires, and ongoing evaluations every 6 months for all academic faculty to provide ongoing educational effort assessment and feedback. This feedback is formative and constructive, celebrates successes in faculty educational efforts, and when opportunities for improvement are identified, the leadership team works with the faculty to individualize plans for success that highlight the faculty members strengths and opportunities for improvement and provide the faculty with any necessary tools to support this improvement.